Showing posts with label surds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surds. Show all posts

Wednesday, 20 February 2013

"I have...Who has?" for Simplifying Surds

My new addiction is "I have... Who has...?" cards. I'd seen the idea around a bit, also called "Follow me" or something like that, but never tried any.

Then I found a free example for telling the time from superteacherworksheets and used it with my year 10s.

The basic idea is that the cards make up a chain of matching items. They can be question-and-answer style or just different ways of representing the idea. The time cards have a clock face for "I have..." and a written time for "Who has...?"

We played just by calling out. So I took a card and read my "Who has...?" question. The students all look at their clock faces and whoever has that one answers "I have..." and follows by reading their question. When we got back to me, the game was done.

Of course, you have to have everyone paying attention! This was the hardest part for the class.

Other ways to play, I believe, include using it as a way to get everyone into a circle or a line in a random order, and you could also get the students just to put the cards into order as a kind of matching activity.

Today I tried my own little revision one with year 11 Mathematics. Yesterday we simplified surds, so today we checked our knowledge with these cards:



This was a bit of fun, quick revision and a good check of who still needed help with the work. Also they are very simple to make if you don't need images! So I plan to do lots of algebra ones.

I also suggested to my resident PDHPE teacher that it would be a hilarious game for revising knowledge of STDs. Not sure if he'll take me up on that one.

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

BINGO!

I love bingo. It seems to me that students do more drill questions playing bingo than they are willing to do in any other format, and don't care in the slightest that all they are doing is repetitive drill questions.

I know that as a classroom activity it is not exactly Quality Teaching, there is no deep conceptual understanding or exploration or critical thinking, but I like to think of it as a more engaging alternative to textbook work. I don't care for textbooks, especially in the junior years.

I used excel to randomly generate sheets, which means answers will sometimes be repeated. Usually I let them cross off multiples all at once, since I won't ask two questions with the same answer.

I generally write one question at a time and then every 10 or so go through the answers with the class so they can check if they missed any and to discuss method as we solve them. In some classes kids shout out a lot so this works well. With others I have found it works better to write up a few questions at a time then wander around helping people during the time everyone takes to find the answers. Obviously it depends how hard the questions are too.

All of my Bingo files are in this folder, and it contains the following items:


I've also used other versions where I've just given the students a range of values to choose from and had them draw their own grid. It's much easier as long as the values are simple (e.g. numbers from -10 to 10) and avoids repetitions. I've also given them a number plane to draw some points on and rolled two dice to randomly generate points.